Episode Overview

Podcast: The Marketing Millennials
Host: Daniel Murray
Episode Title: How to Measure Marketing Effectively with Sorin Patilinet | Ep. 366
Date: November 14, 2025

This episode features Sorin Patilinet, a data-driven marketing leader with 20+ years of experience at brands like Mars and PepsiCo. The conversation centers on how to measure marketing effectiveness beyond the standard ROI metric, emphasizing holistic measurement frameworks, behavioral data, neuroscience, and practical tools for marketers. Sorin shares his personal journey, engineering mindset, influential projects at Mars, and candid advice for modern marketers.

Key Topics & Insights

Sorin’s Background and Purpose of the Conversation

• [01:13] Sorin's Introduction: Eastern European telecommunication engineer who transitioned to marketing, working at British American Tobacco, Mars, and PepsiCo.
• Sorin’s passion is bridging analytics and brand-building: “I’ve wanted to bring my passion for analytics, my engineering mindset into the world of brands, and that’s where I am today.”
• The episode’s purpose: Discuss what true marketing effectiveness means and how to implement it in major organizations.

Defining Marketing Effectiveness

• Not Just ROI:
  • Marketing effectiveness is more than just showing ROI for advertising; it considers the holistic performance of a brand (strategy, pricing, distribution, product, and organizational insight implementation).
  • “[07:42] Marketing effectiveness to me is a holistic solution to understand how your brand is performing… I'm proposing a framework to look at measuring marketing, not advertising, that goes beyond the ROI of Facebook.”
  • Host's reinforcement: “There’s those levers like distribution, pricing, segmentation that get ignored in that conversation.” [09:18]

Common Pitfalls: Focusing Only on Advertising & ROI

• Functional Silos:

  • Marketing departments often become communication teams, losing touch with critical levers like pricing and distribution (the other “Ps”).
  • “[09:55] …marketing department have become communications departments, because when you have a lot of resources, you tend to segregate different decisions. So sales is in charge of distribution, the finance department is in charge of pricing… and what’s left is primarily strategy and communication.”

• The Real Drivers of Sales:

  • Sorin’s analysis: “Advertising or media or communications is at best 10% of the sales generated by a large scale brand… there are other factors that influence the other 90%.” [11:59]

• Practical Example: Many pricing decisions ignore data on price elasticity or consumer willingness to pay—leaving a lot of business potential untapped.

Setting Up Effective Measurement in Organizations

Where (Not) to Start

• Don’t start from whatever data is available. Instead, clarify the key decisions your marketing function must make, and quantify which are most impactful.
  • “[14:39] The first thing you should clarify is: What are the main decisions you are going to take in marketing? …rank them.”
  • Build a “decision tree” based on potential impact, not convenience of data.

Engineer’s Mindset in Marketing

• Scientific method matters: hypothesis-driven testing, learning from results (even failures), logical systems thinking.

  • Memorable quote: “A lot of marketing is: you have a hypothesis and you’re trying to prove or disprove the hypothesis, but you need to have that to be able to test, [then] learn.” [16:39]

• The reality: Most CEOs are engineers (“9 out of 10” top market cap companies), and marketers should adapt that analytical way of thinking to communicate and make decisions. [18:05]

Pioneering Measurement Approaches at Mars (ACE Project)

• Challenge: Measuring the actual impact of creative content across many formats (Super Bowl, TV, YouTube, etc.).
• Behavioral focus: “I’m a very firm believer that asking people if they like an ad or if they remember an ad is not the right way to do marketing research." [19:55]
• ACE (Advertising Creative Evaluation) Solution:
  • Partnered with Nielsen to use neuroscience (lab studies) to identify key drivers: attention, emotions, cognitive load.
  • Scaled with AI-based facial tracking to measure authentic reactions (attention & emotion) via participants’ device cameras globally (39 markets).
  • Finding: Simpler, clearer creative wins—“Humans prefer easy messages, simple to understand, to decode.” [23:50]
  • Practical advice: Don’t clutter ads with too many elements—show one SKU, one story.

Science of Marketing: Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavioral Data

• Marketers overcomplicate; foundational psychology/behavioral insights are powerful.

  • “[27:13] Marketing is easy, but we complicate it… we get bored when our ads are seen for six months in a row and we think consumers are tired of them.”

• Importance of understanding human needs (“You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” Snickers campaign as a perfect example of harnessing universal insight for creative).

• Host Daniel summarizes: “If you start learning human psychology first… marketing becomes so much easier because there are things that haven’t changed in 2,000, 3,000 years.” [25:45]

AI in Measurement & Creative

• Explosion of Content: Too much to analyze manually; AI is changing measurement.
• Synthetic datasets and models can now predict content performance—but only as good as their training data.
  • “[31:53] The rise of synthetic in research is real and it’s coming towards your creative measurement very, very soon.”
• Caution: “You need to have those good inputs to have good outputs. Bad data in, bad data out.” [33:08]
• Shift in AI Use: “Everybody thought the opportunity is to create more content. While in fact, we want to create better content.” [34:02]

Key Metrics: What to Track (and What to Ignore)

• Stop Tracking: “Any kind of engagement metric" (likes, superficial engagement)—these have less value than once thought. [40:05]
• Start Tracking: Dwell time (how long users actually spend with the content).
  • “If someone decides to spend a little bit longer time with that content… there is something there that shows impact.” [40:33]
• Use dwell time and video watch time for diagnostic feedback—refine hooks, storytelling, and pacing.

Measuring Brand vs Sales Impact

• Sorin’s axiom: “If an ad doesn’t sell, it means it’s not a good working ad.” (paraphrasing David Ogilvy) [36:50]
• Even brand-building campaigns should ultimately connect to sales—otherwise “it’s just art.” [38:39]
• Behavioral data (actual actions/sales) are far preferable to attitudinal surveys.
  • “Always measure consumer behaviors and not settle for easy-to-source attitudes or questionnaires.” [42:10]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On silos and measurement focus:
  “By focusing just on 10% of your potential, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.” (Sorin, [12:15])

• On starting with decisions:
  “The first thing you should clarify is: What are the main decisions… then quantify those decisions [and] rank them.” (Sorin, [14:40])

• On neuroscience in measurement:
  “Humans prefer easy messages, simple to understand, to decode. … Simplify the message to reduce the clutter.” (Sorin, [23:50])

• On AI’s impact:
  “Everybody thought the opportunity is to create more content. While in fact, we want to create better content.” (Sorin, [34:02])

• On behavioral measurement:
  “If an ad doesn’t sell, it means it’s not a good working ad.” (Sorin, [36:50])

• On engagement metrics:
  “Any kind of engagement metric would be something that we are very interested in… but we probably shouldn’t [track].” (Sorin, [40:05])

• On dwell time:
  “If someone decides to spend a little bit longer time with that content than other people, then there is something there that shows impact.” (Sorin, [40:33])

• On surveys:
  “Always measure consumer behaviors and not settle for easy to source attitudes or questionnaires.” (Sorin, [42:10])

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:13 — Sorin’s background and career path
• 04:10 — Mars: Building the Marketing Effectiveness Center, single-source sales panels, ACE, Mars Advertising Principles
• 07:42 — Elevating measurement beyond ROI and advertising; holistic marketing effectiveness
• 09:55 — Why key marketing levers are overlooked (pricing, distribution, product)
• 11:59 — Only 10% of sales driven by advertising/media
• 14:39 — How to set up a measurement framework: start with decisions, not data
• 19:55 — ACE: Rethinking creative measurement with neuroscience and behavioral data
• 23:50 — Simplify creative messaging for effectiveness
• 27:13 — Why marketers overcomplicate things; importance of behavioral science
• 31:53 — The rise of AI and synthetic datasets in creative measurement
• 33:08 — Garbage in, garbage out: AI and data quality
• 36:50 — “If an ad doesn’t sell, it’s not good work.”
• 40:05 — Metrics: What to stop (engagement) and what to start (dwell time) tracking
• 42:10 — Key axiom: Measure behavior, not just surveys

Actionable Takeaways

• Don’t build measurement frameworks around the data you have; start with the business decisions that move your P&L.
• Break out of narrow “communications only” thinking—insist marketing is involved in pricing, product, and distribution.
• Use behavioral science and neuroscience to validate what works in creative (attention, emotion, simplicity).
• AI is powerful for measurement—if you feed it high-quality data—but should be focused on improving quality, not just quantity.
• Prioritize dwell time and real behavioral signals over surface-level engagement metrics.
• Surveys are only one input; real behavioral data is more reliable.
• The best marketing balances long-term brand-building with demonstrable short-term results.

Find More

• Sorin writes frequently on LinkedIn and shares insights on marketing-effectiveness.com.
• His book is available on Amazon and other major retailers.

In Sorin’s words:

“Always measure consumer behaviors and not settle for easy to source attitudes or questionnaires.” [42:10]

And from Daniel:

“You should be learning how to measure marketing, how to make sure marketing is effective, because that’s going to keep you in your job longer—or promote you.” [45:30]